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By Maureen N. McLane
Poetry and political economy would seem to be odd bedfellows, but they’ve been consorting at least since Thomas Malthus quoted Alexander Pope in his “Essay on the Principle of Population” and Wordsworth wrestled with Adam Smith in “The Prelude.” Within “political economy” lurk the oikos (household) and the polis (the city); our reigning algorithmic savants and financial quants too often forget this. Anne Boyer has not forgotten this. She has written a sad, beautiful, passionate book that registers the political economy of literature and of life itself. This sounds dry, abstract: It’s not. Boyer’s book moves as if the contents of a brokenhearted country song were mediated through the ferocious mind of a Hannah Arendt. Boyer offers a self-portrait of the artist in a time of “indentured moods,” debt collection, chemical spills, amid her attempts at and refusals of writing, sewing and the daily care of herself and her small daughter.
Does one have to be a “property owner” to make “literature”? Write memoirs? Poetry? These are perverse questions, perhaps, but they are Boyer’s, and should be ours. This is a deeply, quietly, savagely perverse book, “perverse” in the sense of turning away: from the given, the mandated; from “things conferring authority,” the logic of property, capital, productivity, the obligation to be happy, to be “working on yourself,” to want things. A writerly book about refusals and failures, it entertains “the refusal of accounting altogether,” of any making-good-on (promise, investment, children, one’s own talents, opportunities, indeed, life). Accounting “gives the wrong forms to desire,” Boyer suggests. This is a book of poetry (or is it lyric prose? Essay? Must one decide?) that also turns away from poetry: It has no interest in meter or prosody per se — rather, it is interested in the measuring of thought and feeling, in a slow amazing and amazed rendering of the negative space of official life.
Boyer is fond of short forms and compressed forays — aphorism, epigram, vignette, list, fable, allegory: “Poetry was the wrong art for people who love justice. It was not like dance music. Painting is the wrong art for people who love justice . . . Information is the poetry of the people who love war.” “It was a time of many car troubles, so I waited for tow trucks and saw a squirrel with a marble in her mouth. It was a time of many money troubles, so I wrote about money or wanted to.”
I first encountered Boyer in her conversation this summer with Amy King on the Poetry Foundation website titled “Literature Is Against Us.” A preposterous thing for a writer to claim, perhaps, but not when one thinks of the great, expanding, against-all-odds literature of dispossession. The Boyer of this book has been ill and poor and “so lonely” and has experienced profoundly the edges of what many on this our earth long have — a precarious life. “I was at the edge of cities. I was at the edge of economies. In those days some even accused me of googling my dreams.”
This book is a monument to many things, notably to what the scholar Anne-Lise François calls (in “Open Secrets”) “uncounted experience.” Boyer counts negatively, registering the underside of being and doing, honoring dream, vision, horror, the quotidian. “I think mostly about clothes, sex, food and seasonal variations. I have done so much to be ordinary and made a record of this.” Where does a woman think, and when? “In the kitchen I was chopping vegetables and thinking about how discourse is a conspiracy, then how discourse is a conspiracy like ‘taste,’ then how taste is a weapon of class.” Descartes at his stove, Boyer in her kitchen.
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